My Huge Choko Harvest

I've grown chokos a few times over the last several years. In the upper North Island, chokos can be a rampant perennial vine and heavy cropper, but here in the lower North Island they are not commonly grown as they are very frost tender and often have barely started producing in a season before the frosts kill the vine completely. But this year I got a whopper crop, after doing things a little differently....

What is choko (aka chayote) and how is it used?

The choko is the fruit of the choko or chayote vine. It can be smooth or spiny (I much prefer the smooth varieties!), and the large fruits have a seed inside them which is also edible - adds a slightly nutty flavour - or can be removed. The fruits are peeled and then sliced, and can be added to a huge variety of dishes, from stir fries to soups and stews, cakes and other baking, fruit crumbles etc. Chokos are very mild in flavour - picking up the flavours of other foods they are cooked with. I love them sliced and cooked with garlic and oyster sauce. Last night I cut on into chunks and baked it in the oven with the chicken thighs and kumara I was cooking, turning it a couple of times in the juices from the chicken - yum! Others like to fry it with bacon and onions, and I've head of plenty of people who bottle them with apples or use in apple crumbles or pies to make the fruit go further. It's very versatile!

How to get and grow a plant

Chokos are easy to grow. All you need to start one off is a whole fruit, sold seasonally in supermarkets and greengrocers, or given away by fellow gardeners. In the upper North Island you can probably just plonk one or two in the ground and let nature do the rest (don't take my word for that - I've never grown choko up north!), but down here this is how I have to do it:

Because the plants are frost sensitive and also grow very fast, I want to delay the initial growth as long as possible. Therefore I store my fruits in baskets out in an enclosed carport, where it's cold. About July or August I bring a couple inside and set them on top of my fridge. The seed inside them puts out a shoot from the fat end of the fruit (opposite end from where it was previously attached to it's vine), which becomes very long quite quickly. I then choose the strongest looking one, and lay it on it's side in a large (30 litre) plant pot mostly filled with potting mix and/or compost, and just barely cover it. I add a tomato cage or an offcut of trellis to support the growing vine, and after watering well set it in a sunny spot, either next to the ranchslider inside my north-facing foyer, or in the greenhouse (on nights with hard frosts I might move it inside or cover it as even in the greenhouse sensitive plants can freeze). 

Once all danger of frost is past, I move it out to my garden, next to a trellis or fence or shed (ideally all three!) in a sheltered spot. Some years I've carefully transplanted the plant into the garden soil, but this usually gives poor results. My most successful years have been when I just set the whole pot on top of a garden bed that has been prepared with added compost, and kept well watered. The plant will grow roots down through the bottom of the pot and into the soil. 

In late summer to early autumn, the vine produces tiny almost unnoticeable white flowers, which the bees love. These turn into fruit which swell quite rapidly, assuming early frosts don't kill the thing off first. You can pick and eat them at any size you like; I tend to let them mature to a large size for storing, unless threatening frost means I need to hurry up and harvest.
In previous (good) years, I've gotten a basket or two of fruits from the vine.

So what was different this year?

Well actually this year started nearly 2 years ago. In late autumn 2018 I purchased some chokos from a market garden shop, as I no longer had any from previous crops. I started some off as above. When it came time to move the plant to the garden, it was still pretty small so I figured I should get away with transplanting it. So I did. The plant grew very slowly last summer, and by the end of the season (autumn 2019) still had not gained any significant size, nor flowered or fruited. So I decided to just dig the thing up, trim it back a bit, and put it into a pot and see if it would keep going in the greenhouse over winter. Last spring, it was this plant in it's pot I moved out to the garden, and this time just put next to the fence. Where it grew. And grew. And GREW!

​Another variable I should perhaps mention is that the garden bed in front of the fence where I placed it had been very overgrown with bindweed and couch, so I had weedeatered the lot, covered in cardboard then weedmat then bark, just as a means of killing off all the weeds for the season. There is an apple and a lemon tree in that garden; usually I grow some herbs or flowers under them in summer, but needed to get it under control. I also, before putting down the weedmat, added compost judiously, including under where I planned on putting the choko pot. When it came time to place it, I cut away the weedmat from directly under it, so the pot sat snuggled down a little in the compost. All of this would have provided a nourishing, cool, damp potential root run for the vine.

Ultimately the vine covered the apple tree, the lemon tree, sprawled over the shed roof behind the fence, and grew forward and under the outdoor table and chair set too. It was trying to take over the world in all directions! 

I was happy when I saw it start flowering, what seemed a bit earlier than usual, and then could see some fruits developing. There appeared to be a reasonable potential harvest there, but I really had no idea.....

Harvest time....

We had had a couple of very light frosts - not yet damaging - so I was keeping a beady eye on the forecast, as I didn't want frost damaged fruit (which won't store). On the morning of 15th of April was one of these, though the overnight low had been forecast to be 7C. Now, these are always air temps, and ground temperatures are about 3-4 degrees lower than air temp, but even so, this forecast was way off for here, where the actual air temp got down to 3C, and so there was ice on the cars and other surfaces. I wondered if I should start harvesting. I checked the forecast for that night....5C. Yep, going to harvest! 

I got out a couple of large green produce trays, wiped them down and set them on the table near the vine. I started picking the fruits I could see, then started lifting and even pulling out some vine to find more. The bins quickly filled, so I found a couple of banana boxes. Kept picking. The boxes filled. Found more. Realised some of the vine had grown over the fence, so went around the other side into the paddock (where the sheep usually trim it off) and picked a few more fruit. At that point I looked in the shed, and realised the clearlight panels in the roof were literally sagging under the weight of a bunch of chokos! So I had to get a ladder, cut off the vine along the fence on one side, climb up the side of the shed on the ladder, and pull the vine towards me, then use a broom to sweep fruits towards me so I could reach them (many let go from the vine as I pulled it). 

When I was done I had 3 bins and 4 banana boxes full of chokos - I could scarely lift them. Roughly estimated, about 200kg of choko! Woweee! 

For next season....

The vine, apart from the parts I cut off, is still actually growing. Turns out for some odd reason the app on my phone was showing me the forecast for another part of the country entirely, which I didn't notice, and there was no frost that night! LOL. Oh well, they needed picking anyway. I'm going to cut down the rest of the vine, and move the pot with the base of the plant back into the greenhouse, just to see if it survives to grow another year. Just in case, I'll also sprout a couple ready for next season. 

Now to try out lots of new recipes...and give away lots, and maybe sell some....
And, of course, post the good recipes on this site. :-)